Recently I’ve been reading a lot about the topic of mesh VPNs (tinc, Nebula, Tailscale, ZeroTier, Netmaker, Netbird, etc) and find them pretty interesting. Is anyone here using these in some capacity at home or maybe at work?
My problem so far is that many of the options seem to be aimed at corporate use, understandably, so the developers can earn enough to keep doing it. This means the focus is on a centralized control plane, one server which knows everything about the entire network and manages firewall rules for all of it.
This is why I’m leaning towards Nebula, since I think the decentralized design just makes more sense. There is some centralization for issuing certs though. How do I go about setting up PKI? Is there some open source solution for managing certificates and automatically renewing them?
There’s also the option of using vanilla WireGuard. This is my current setup, but I really like the idea of meshing, since it means I don’t need to care if my devices are physically on the same network or not, the best connection will be used. Basically the layer of abstraction is a nice convenience that lets me think about hosts or services independently of the physical network topology.
I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this topic! What’s your setup like and what do you use it for?
Cool! I was really intrigued by yggdrasil, do you use it for a private network only, or do you connect with the public peers? And do you recall any connectivity issues related to NAT or firewalls (if mobile clients are part of your network)?
Mostly private, but I’ve used public peers in the past to give myself more flexibility. I usually have a cheap VPS setup as a gateway. The auto routing is really powerful, I just have a couple of hosts on my LAN that peer directly with the gateway and the rest is handled by local discovery. My mobile clients will usually have the same gateway setup for roaming, but if I’m hanging out at a library I might use a public peer over TLS if my gateway’s port is blocked.